Jobbers: Coming Soon(ish) to a Sold-Out Arena Near You

Jobbers is coming to an arena near you

I wouldn’t normally post Calls for Submissions with deadlines this many months away, but I don’t normally find ones I like as much as this. The people who do Broken Pencil, and the people who do Ferno House, are coming together to do an anthology of creative work by Canadians on professional wrestling. Regular Vox followers will know me as someone who occasionally writes poems in the voice of Gorilla Monsoon or extolling the birth of Andre the Giant, so you know that this one has my eye. May 1st is the deadline so, even if you don’t like pro. wrestling (and I don’t, at least not now, it’s more of a half-remembered adolescent crush) you have plenty of time to develop a fascination, commit it to paper, and make the due date.

Here’s the call, copied and pasted directly from someone else’s blog. Sorry Rob, journalistic integrity is for people who get paid.

JOBBERS: CALL FOR SUBMISSION

Ladies and Gentlemen this call for submission is scheduled for one fall and it is for inclusion in the most electrifying anthology in the history of CanLit…

In professional wrestling slang, the term “job” describes a losing performance in a wrestling match. It is derived from the euphemism “doing one’s job”, which was employed to protect kayfabe (in other words, the portrayal of events in the wrestling industry as real). As professional wrestling is scripted, inevitably a wrestler will be required to lose to an opponent …

Inspired by Michael Holmes’ 2004 collection of poetry Parts Unknown: Wrestling, Gimmicks and Other Works and Nicholas Sammond’s 2005 collection of essays Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, comes Jobbers: A Can-Lit Wrestling Reader.

Jobbers wants your best non-fiction, fiction, and poetry that reviles, reflects, or revels in the art of professional wrestling. Capture the steroidal zaniness of the cartoon rock and wrestling mid 1980s or the over-gimmicked dark ages of the early 1990s. Recall with nostalgia the glory days of pre-McMahon black and white regional integrity.

Explore the exhausted locker rooms of your local small-time wrestling league. Write erotic love poems to your favourite bespandexed hero or villain. Give us a “hell yeah” as you investigate the middle-finger-in-the-air screwjobs of the Attitude Era. Give us humour or heartbreak, caustic wit or hyperbolic fandom.

So whether you’re a local hero, heel or not quite sure, send us your best wrasslin’-inspired literature. No limits, no restrictions, and no rules, but remember to do your “job”. Edited by Toronto Literary Tag Team jobbers Spencer Gordon and Nathaniel G. Moore.

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Vox’s note: There doesn’t seem to be an email address attached to this thing. You could maybe go to Spencer or Nathaniel’s blog to track them down.

Explore posts in the same categories: Calls for Submission, Canadian Literature, Collaborations, Fellow Bloggers, Poems in the Wider World, Toronto Poetry Cult